Departure

120

It was a Sunday evening that Daina and I parted ways. Given how much of our time together had been to share watching television shows, it seemed to make sense to end with the last new show until a span of repeats began.

Originally, I was shocked. When I told Daina of my 'situation' years earlier she had actually seemed enthusiastic about helping me research it and even lent me her car for my trips to see the specialist in Denver. But as time went on, she had become irritated and despondent and wouldn't say why. I just ended up assuming it was from the news of her mother's cancer and subsequent death. But now that I had contacted my family to let them know of my 'situation' and decision to normalize as female, the source of Daina's resentment toward me became clear: It was this decision. She wouldn't talk to me about it but finally agreed to join me to some visits with Samuel in the hopes that he could tease out the issues behind the resentments.

Daina and I sat side by side on his couch as he sat in the single chair across from us and gently prodded for what the issue might be. Finally Daina burst out that she didn't think I should be a woman as I made ''Animal Noises''. I burst out with an incredulous smile, fighting back the urge to break out laughing and fought to guess what she meant by that. Finally I did put two & two together and noted that, indeed, I sometimes would say ''meow'' to a cat, or ''woof'' to a dog, or ''moo'' to a cow, but I didn't see how that was a problem. Samuel turned to Daina and she wasn't going to explain it any further and the first of these three appointments soon came to an end with little more than Samuel getting some general information on Daina's background. Leaving his office I couldn't help myself and asked Daina, ''Animal Noises?'' She didn't want to talk about it or the session any further.

For the second visit, Daina had little to offer other than my height as to why I shouldn't choose to be a woman. That was easily addressed as I noted, because of my intersexed background, I had actually ended up a bit shorter than my mother and the same height as my sister. While in the transsexual field there had developed a race based conclusion of who should and who shouldn't change ''from a man to a woman'' based on how their height and weight fit into the idealized Caucasian norm, as I was from a mixed race background and, for that matter I was addressing an intersexed condition not a transsexual issue, that sort of gauge didn't seem relevant to me. Daina didn't have a response and the meeting was soon over without any new insights as to what was causing her irritation about my decision.

During this time I had gotten my RMT job offer and accepted it and Vocational Rehabilitation actually paid for cab fare to take me to and from the complex each day I worked for the first two weeks until I received my first paycheck and could use it as a down payment for my own a car. As a result, between dinners and Daina helping me decide on my business wear wardrobe, we would visit various used car lots in search of a car I might like. During these times it had become the rule that we were not to talk of the cause of her irritation until our next appointment with Samuel. So the irritation just persisted creating a wall between us as the weeks wore on. We finally found a car for me, but as I had only just started a new job after years of being unemployed, I couldn't get financing for it on my own and Daina finally agreed to cosign my car loan so, if for any reason I stopped making payments for it, Daina would be on the hook for the balance and the financing company would feel safe. I thanked her, but she saw my getting a car as a means of us spending less tense time together in her car.

By the third meeting the dam broke at Samuel's office:

When Daina had first met me she had been with a coworker friend, 'Rochelle', and as Rochelle was the extroverted one of the pair, she befriended me first. Given Rochelle's comely appearance and her propensity to talk of her many past boyfriends as conquests, her limited presence in my life had lead people to believe I had chosen her as a girlfriend and thus this had given me 'a reputation'. While the friendship with Rochelle didn't last long, she had then started listing me at Daina's & her workplace as one of her past boyfriends, thus giving me 'a reputation' at their school in the rumor mill as well. Daina saw this as her chance to establish her own 'reputation' as she had never had a boyfriend of her own, nor had even been on a real date for fear of ending up in a relationship like her parents had during her lifetime.

By befriending me, Daina had been leading her school friends to believe we were an intimate couple over these past few years. Then when I told her of my 'situation' Daina had come to realize that God had sent me to her. In her mind I truly was that 'perfect boyfriend for her'. We had so many interests in common and given my physical 'limitations' she would never have to worry about me wanting anything of her sexually that she was uncomfortable facing. So for me, while we had been friends these past few years and she had been helping me out as I regained my health and tried to reclaim my life, to her friends she had portrayed me as her boyfriend having fresh stories of our frequent times together doing stuff and letting her coworkers and family assume more was happening 'after hours'.

That was why Daina was against my normalizing as female as: What would she tell her friends? Her family? That nothing had been going on all along and she had been intentionally misleading them? Of course she couldn't. Daina originally thought that when I looked into my intersexed 'situation' it would result in my finding ways to become 'more of a man', but once it was clear that wasn't going to happen, Daina wanted me to remain as I had been living my life since the age of thirteen, bound and pretending to be a man as best I could, that way I would continue to ''be the man'' in her life.

I told her after so many years of already living my life that way, I definitely didn't want to spend the rest of it like that as well. Drawing from her wealth of classical readings, Daina tried to point out that ''Your life story makes such a great classical tragedy. Why would you want to give that up and have a life just like everyone else?''

I was speechless as was Samuel and when the end of the appointment came Daina made her way back to the car while Samuel held me back for a moment. He recommended I end my friendship with Daina as soon as possible...!

But I still felt we could work it out. Daina could just let it come out to her friends and coworkers that we weren't 'a couple' but 'just friends' during these years but that wasn't what Daina wanted to do. She liked the reputation she had gained in their eyes. As the subsequent weeks went on, she further explained to me that another reason she didn't want me as a 'female' friend in her life was because all of her female friends had subsequently found a boyfriend and coupled up, leaving Daina behind, forgotten. She couldn't bear the thought that I might, also, find myself a boyfriend 'afterwards' and not only would she be left behind, again, but having come from a mixed-sex background be ''more successful being a woman'' than she had been during her lifetime.

While I told her I didn't have any dating goals in mind, I also wasn't willing to swear I would never be open to them in the future. With that, Daina concluded for herself that we needed to end our friendship and while I tried to comfort and assure her it wouldn't be an issue, her slowly welling hostility toward me made it clear that the past fun of our friendship was going to disappear either way and I finally relented and agreed to the end.

After finishing our final television show for the night, I followed Daina out to her car and we chatted for a bit and then I thanked her for all of her help and support over these past many years I had known her. Given how she had fed me and helped me when my apartment had been destroyed as well as assuring I was able to go back to College and frequently provided me rides as part of it so I could complete my degree, I thanked her for ''saving my life'' as my final words to her. That seemed to coax a smile out of her for the first time in months and she got into her car and started it while I made my way back to my apartment.

I moved to my bedroom window and opened the curtains to watch her car drive by... And she was gone. I stood there for a while looking to the grassy vacant lot beyond the parking lot for a time and it dawned on me I was back to my childhood place starting out my sister's bedroom window to the hayfield beyond, waiting for the time when she would come back and see me again.

But in this case I knew Daina never would.

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Seeing The Destination

117

And with the end of May Nineteen Ninety-Four came the end of my last full semester of College. Having a chat with the receptionist student of half American and half German background, she told me that it had been a very close decision when tallying the grades but she had just narrowly beat me to become our Campus's Valedictorian. As the role conferred the responsibility of giving the speech at the graduation ceremony, I was glad I had just missed the bar as I didn't want to attend the event anyhow. I had actually received a better honor already by the time I graduated. The College had offered an Academic Excellence Award the previous year and I had won it giving me some additional scholarship money. With the end of College came the end of my Social Security PASS Plan and I would once again be back to my normal monthly income. Now with the most recent turn of the year cost of living adjustment, I would have just over one hundred dollars of spare money each month. I remembered how I had started at my first apartment having just under fifty dollars per month five years earlier.

There was still one more College class for me to take. It was a job hunt preparation class of only a couple sessions offered at the end of each semester for graduating students. As the Spring version conflicted with a core class I needed for my degree, my chance to take it had been bumped to the end of the summer semester. Still I wasn't going to wait for it before updating my resume and mailing it out. Actually, as I had gained such a diversity of skills over the years, I created three 'targeted' resumes, each with a subset of my skills intended for different types of computer jobs. One variation listed all of my Desktop Publishing skills, one for my Personal Computer maintenance and configuration skills, and finally the Computer Programming variation listing all of my completed projects, languages, and development platform experience. But this last one gave me pause. As I had roughly fourteen years of software development under my belt, but listed my degree as being received this year, I wondered if this resume would be seen as 'too good to be true'. As I had already had years of people disregarding my computer skills as they couldn't believe that I could truly have them I decided to play it safe and take out my most impressive projects, just keeping to a handful that would show breadth of skill without too much depth of experience. Technically, everything still in that resume was true, it just left out quite a bit.

With these resumes completed, I began mailing them to various businesses I thought might be interested and have openings, especially Rocky Mountain Telecom. That was still the place I wanted to work at and given my past letter of recommendation and the names of a few managers there, I felt I'd be a shoo-in now that I had my degree 'in hand'.

One wrinkle, I didn't have my degree in hand yet. As I hadn't taken that final course, they hadn't printed it up for the end of the spring semester. I'd have to wait until after the end of the summer semester before they'd issue the 'sheep skin' document to me. I didn't think it would be an issue.

Our local office of Colorado Vocational Rehabilitation was thrilled with my completion of college and let the University of Colorado job hunting team know so they could now bring forth jobs requiring a degree in order to apply. As a twist, they had found a job for me that didn't need the degree. Their helper I most often worked with had a perfect job for me: His wife was part of a start-up business that would be producing a new medical device. The Federal Drug Administration approval of their device would come down 'any day now' and they'd be making money hand over fist. As they wanted to get ready for that, they had rented office space and wanted to hire me to setup and maintain all of their data processing systems and office computers. I was taken to the empty office space they were going to move into and met his wife and all seemed fine, but it just wasn't that Rocky Mountain Telecom type job I had my eye on. Further, there were often reports in the news of how the F.D.A. routinely dragged their feet on approving anything and I felt like this new business was counting their one chicken before it had hatched. I explained this to the job hunting associate as my reasons why I wouldn't take the job, noting too that Social Security only had a limited transition period when taking a job and I didn't want to lose it on a business that might be defunct in under a year if the F.D.A. approval didn't come as hoped for.

To put it mildly, he was outraged I was turning down this job opportunity. He had been working on my behalf for the past two years to find me a job and here I was, with the first solid job opening he had found for me, nix that, a job specifically designed by him through his wife's position at the start-up to use my talents, and I was turning it down so I could wait around for a ''Pie in the sky'' corporate job that I would most likely never get. Not only was he outraged but he was dropping me as a client. My VocRehab counselor, Greg, was shaken by this as well but at the same time he understood my position and decided he wouldn't let this fall out result in VocRehab dropping me, too. Still, he warned me that I really couldn't pick and chose a prospective job, I needed to be thankful for what I could get going forward.

Two months later, Daina and I drove past the set of offices the start-up company had been settling into only to now see the offices were once again vacant and for lease. Either the F.D.A. approval had failed to come through like I suspected and the company had already folded, or they had hit it big and decided to immediately move to a more prestigious office park elsewhere in town. As I never heard the name of the company again, I suspect it was the former that happened and I had made the right decision.

In the meantime, since my resume was already sent in to various companies around town, all I needed to do was sit at my apartment and wait to hear back from one or more of them with job offers. The months came, and the months went, without a call.

When August came and I took the preparing to job hunt class, sure enough, there was nothing in the class that I didn't already know...

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My Role

114

My life was in a gentle arc of finishing the last year of College classes before I'd have my long sought after Bachelors degree. In Nineteen Ninety-Three very little happened in my life to disturb this gentle conclusion to my college years. But that doesn't mean the time wasn't without some tidbits...

One summer day Daina thought it would be easier if I just drove myself home from her condo that evening and then pick her up the next afternoon for errands rather than making the trip both ways herself. That made sense to me and I drove to my apartment complex and parked behind my bedroom window and settled in for the night. The next morning I got up, cleaned up, and dressed and looked out my apartment back window to check the weather. While the weather was fine, I realized Daina's car was gone! Not knowing how to respond to this, I decided to go to the complex's manager and ask him for his advice. He winced when I told him the news and explained that late last night the parking lot had been filled with cars that he suspected were for the next door jazz club. So he called up a towing company and in the darkness of night had them tow away all the cars he didn't recognize. This next day, a number of tenants had been coming to him to ask where their cars were. As with them, he handed me enough money from petty cash to pay for the car to be released from the tow lot and gave me the address. I checked the address inside my apartment against the bus route map and there were no buses that went to that end of town. How was I supposed to get Daina's car back?

Sheepishly calling Daina and telling her the story, I wondered if one of her work friends could play chauffeur for us to collect her car, while I had the release money and car key, I also feared the tow yard might not release the car to me as it was in Daina's name. She called a friend who was free and gave her a ride and soon after picked me up and we got Daina's car back and took her friend out for breakfast as payment.

Always wanting to approach problems in a constructive manner, I returned to the manger and said that, since I had experience with desktop publishing, I could create parking tags for him to pass out to the tenants and then he would be better able to tell which cars belonged in the parking lot and which ones didn't. He though that was a great idea and all I asked for in return was the cost of getting them printed. He agreed and I went to work on my computer and came up with a design that he liked and the problem was soon solved. Having gotten to know me better, he asked me where I worked out. Worked out? I asked. He said he could tell I was a body builder since I wore a sweat tee shirt and he was thinking of building up his muscles as well. I noted that I didn't go to a club but 'worked out' at home.

This was funny. As with my notebook in High School, now my attempt to hide my breasts during my final college years had 'over achieved' and people mistook my sports bra strapped down breast as prominent pectoral muscles, despite my long hair tied as a tail. I'd cut the sleeves down on the sweat shirts which I used to hide the sports bra straps, I guess people assumed those short sleeves hid the otherwise nonexistent bulging muscles of my upper arms? One time a female teacher in one of my classes called for our nightly mid-class break, she quickly made her way to the door out, but then stopped with a group of girls waiting by the door for some reason. As I got from the back of the class to the door to leave she burst into laughter as if someone had told her a joke, though I hadn't seen any of them talking at the time. She leaned forward and supported herself momentary from 'the laughter' by resting her hand on the left side of my chest. Once I got to the cafeteria and thought about it, I felt this was a staged moment and could only guess that the teacher wanted to cop-a-feel of my 'pectoral muscle' to see how firm it was. As it was my breast strapped down by the sports bra a couple of sizes too small, I wondered what she reported to the girls who had gathered by her once I left the room?

When I had returned to College the previous year, I was greeted by the half American/half German girl who handled the reception desk at the office when otherwise not in a class herself. Over the years I would chat with her from time to time when I'd visit the office. One evening when I was chatting with her during the class break, she suddenly brought up the topic about 'all of those minorities around ruining the country' while eying me intently. Given my Native American mixed race background, I decided not to bring that up and instead simply shrugged my shoulders and replied, ''I hadn't thought about that.'' She didn't continue with the topic and with the way she had looked at me intently at the time I wasn't sure if she was trying to figure out if 'I was a body builder' because I was a secret White Supremacist, or if she herself was one and had been trying to see if I'd make a good recruit? I hoped it wasn't the latter as, given her half German ancestry, that would have been a sad commentary that there were still problems in Germany despite how World War II had turned out. Either way, I reduced my subsequent visits with her to only the few times I needed to ask her about an office related question.

With Fall, came the obligatory 'Psychology 101' class. I was actually looking forward to taking it as, with my years seeing Jude and then Samuel, I felt like a psychology acolyte as much of the time they would be giving me pointers on how to assess troubled people and help to calm them down if they were having a problem relating to me and my ambiguous nature. Arriving at the first day of the class, this new instructor flat out told us that, rather than going through the book and teaching us about psychology, he was going to 'teach us to be good Christians as that was the only thing we needed to know for good mental health'. Then once he was done with that he would briefly go through the book at the end of the semester to point out all of the flaws in the 'secular humanist psychological philosophy'. When break came, I went straight to the office to withdraw from the class and transfer to the daytime version taught by one of the instructors I already knew and respected. That paperwork done, I went to the cafeteria for the rest of my break.

When I left there I was spotted by one of the staff and asked to return to the office. In there was the rest of my 'Psychology 101' classmates and they, too, had decided to drop the night class and look into joining the day class. Given that the College would no longer have the minimum number of students left in the night class to pay for the instructor to be there, they were instead going to replace him by the following week and didn't want any of us to transfer out. We agreed and I returned to the classroom to retrieve my books and then left the teacher to watch me leave for the rest of the night. I wondered if he was aware of what was going on at the office...?

Had the other students been following my lead, or had all of us deciding to drop the class at the same time been a coincidence given the attitude of the instructor? In this case, rather than pet my already over inflated ego, I've assumed it was a coincidence.

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Time With Samuel

113

Seeing Samuel was a huge ego boost for me. After years of no support and harassment at the hands of medical doctors and other psychology professionals, he was completely supportive of my 'situation' and my desire to look into and resolve it.

During our first sessions, he asked about my previous experiences with psychological professionals and I told him of the psychologist who'd I first seen during my four day hospital stay in Nineteen Eighty-Seven, which was a good experience, and then the times with the mental health social worker 'Stella Hernandez' who had spent the sessions telling me about her life and problems rather than the other way around, my experiences with the Vocational Rehabilitation psychologist and his bizarre technique & findings, and my brief time with the counselor whose office was at the other hospital in town who denied I had even had a sister and who desperately wanted to find records of a nonexistent time I was in a mental institution. Samuel noted that often times people go into the psychological field to learn about their own issues rather than with the goal of helping others in mind and as a result they will often spend their time using patients as blank slates for their own use.

In my case Samuel felt I made the perfect blank slate given my ambiguous racial background as well as my biologically ambiguous sex and tendency to be initially quiet when meeting people given my stuttering. He could see many people filling in that initial question mark of who and what I was with what was going on in their own minds rather than taking me as I truly was. I noted the many times I had people see me and blow up about things I knew nothing about but they thought I was guilty of; and also of the times when people would see me and suddenly feel I was the right person to unburden themselves about dark matters in their lives.

Samuel agreed that these occurrences fit into his 'blank slate' theory. Some people saw me as a way to externalize their own neuroses, in the case of things people didn't like about themselves they would paint them onto me. In the case of people who needed to unburden themselves, they could imagine me as the person they needed to confess to as there was nothing definitive about me to dissuade them and also, seeming to appear outside of the social norm, I wasn't perceived as a threat that would, or socially could, judge them for their confession. He noted that often times people of any particular majority would often feel more comfortable telling secret things to people of a perceived minority as 'if it ever got out' they could use the person's minority status as a reason why that information shouldn't be given credence.

I mentioned a time when someone said they believed I could 'read peoples souls', Samuel returned that it was people's reactions to me that gave me the insight into other peoples' souls. In many ways I was like a walking-taking Rorschach Test for some people.

As part of coming up to speed about me, Samuel requested to get the records of my neuropsychological evaluation from 'Dr. Maverick'. I agreed though pointed out my past experiences that doctors would use those contacts to verbally pass on B.S. about me to other professionals. He said we could give it a try and see what happens. I signed the paperwork and he sent off for the records. When they arrived he told me that while she might have told me verbally that my pain in the left side of my head and subsequent permanent deficit in February of Nineteen Eighty-Nine 'might have been a stroke' she had noted it affirmatively in her records, so the diagnosis stood. He then told me a few sessions later that 'Dr. Maverick' was having to move her practice out of town and she was now disavowing that diagnosis in order to avoid further trouble with the Colorado Medical community.

Still, from her records Samuel confirmed my genius I.Q. level and explained to me that my score meant I was 'at or above the doctorate level in most subject areas'. He clarified that it was 'at or above' as the tests were standardized to the doctorate level and since I had maxed out in so many areas, for all we knew I was above the doctorate level and they simply couldn't detect that with the test. I joking asked him if that was why I had so many problems with medical doctors, since the saying was 'doctors make the worst patients' and I was 'at the doctorate level'. We laughed at that and then he confirmed it might be the case as I was sharp enough to sometimes see through the doctors' actions and realize they weren't making logical sense in what they were doing or saying.

He asked if I wouldn't mind taking one of his own favored psychological tests and I agreed. When the results came back, it found me to be normal BUT that it flagged that I seemed to be hiding negative information about myself. When we discussed what that might mean I noted the handful of questions it had asked about presumed past sexual partners and resulting problems with them. As I had never had any sexual partners I therefore reported never having problems with them. Just to see, we picked one of those questions and changed the answer to 'have had a problem with' and reran the results. The following meeting he affirmed that the test now found me to be normal without any reservations. We concluded the test should be updated not to assume everyone taking it had been sexually active beforehand.

When the topic reached to my mixed-sex 'situation' it ultimately came down to first making sure I was fully aware of the social pluses & minuses of each gender role, and helping me deal with other people who were uncomfortable with me given my ambiguity and possible future choices. In the case of gender roles he felt I had a pretty good handle on them as I had started to observe and consider the differences since my surprise puberty at age thirteen. In the case of helping people it was more of the same sort of 'unofficial psychological counseling pointers' that Jude had given me for dealing with medical doctors, to first calm any situation down as much as possible and then spend time asking questions to bring into the open the source of the other person's discomfort and discuss it.

When it came to what choice I would make, as Dr. 'Czarniecki' concluded that I couldn't be biologically any more 'a man' than I already was, and the trial estrogen injections had made the sudden fevers I had been experiencing during the previous decade of my life go away, it seemed a simple choice to me to consider normalizing as female. That decision would have been much harder for me if we had still been in nineteen fifties America with its strict and confining life choices women had in that day and age, but by the nineteen nineties women had made huge strides toward equality in America. What level of discrimination that was left seemed little different to what I had already faced with my mixed-race background and life long stuttering. When it came to seeing medical doctors, I couldn't imagine things being worse than what I had already experienced with them while being intersexed. On that point, Samuel agreed.

As women more often than not had longer hair than men, Samuel recommended I grow out my hair and see if I liked having it that way...

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Counseling Sessions

46

After the psychiatric nurse recommended I seek out the community mental health clinic for on going care, after a couple weeks of consideration, I did. The psychiatric nurse was the first person, beyond my mother nearly a decade earlier, that I had ever started to bring-up my 'situation' to. And yet while she didn't have any interest in it, I found that once I had opened that door, I wanted to continue talking about it... With someone.

And so I sought out the community mental health clinic and found their main branch location at the far end of town. When I got there and talked with them and found out their phone number for future visits, they noted that they had a branch location nearer to where I lived and set-up my first appointment there. It was based on a sliding scale and since my personal income was only a few hundred dollars of temporary state aid each month, I was able to get in and have appointments for a two dollar co-pay. So far, so good, I reflected.

'Stella Hernandez' was assigned as my counselor and we first had to get the elephant out of the room; within the first two weeks we discussed and she agreed that I didn't have any psychological eating disorder. Once that topic was out of the way, I thought we could now get to the subject of my strange puberty and I could gain some understanding and insight.

She explained to me how she had benefited a great deal from counseling herself and how she had wished she could continue with it even though her counselor finally decided one day that she no longer needed to come. But then it occurred to her to seek a job as a counselor herself, and then in this way she would be able to continue in counseling, albeit with the shoe on the other foot. Stella told me of the time she and her friends got to go on a trip to Spain, in their teenaged years, and visit the coast there. She told me of the job she had with a retired military boss who would only call her by her last name and how that hurt her feelings until she realized through counseling that he was just calling her by the last name as he called everyone else and it didn't mean anything personal.

I was initially very impressed with Stella and her technique of being the first to open up with me so, I assumed, I'd grow comfortable in the relationship and more easily open up to her. She told me many highlights of her childhood and the awkward moments during her teenaged years and of troubles finding her first job as an adult. By the end of the first five weeks, I found myself wanting to force my way, edgewise, into the continuous monologue about herself: So I could talk about 'me'.

It was then I began to realize what she had meant by her desire to continue with counseling, the only problem was I was now the one making the co-payment on her behalf.

By the sixth week I made sure to have the first word of the appointment before she could start talking at length about another aspect of her life. I said I wanted to talk about my gender issue and what it meant. She flat out told me how lucky I was to be legally male and not to worry about it because it made me 'so privileged in society'. In fact, she told me, I had never known discrimination in my life as a result of being deemed male and why would I want to open up that can of worms? I sat there incredulous for a time, apparently my gaping expression was enough to leave her speechless for a moment.

''So you're saying that me, as a stutterer with a mixed raced background, had never known discrimination in my life? That seems plausible to you?'' I responded.

She was flustered for a moment then clarified that being a woman was a whole new level of discrimination in society that would make anything else I had experienced pale in comparison. Be that as it may, I didn't know why that meant we shouldn't talk about my 'situation' and what might have caused it, what it meant, and what I could or should do about it. But the flood gates were open and she gave me examples of people thinking less of her because she was a woman, ultimately the examples didn't seem all that different from my own experiences, but our time was soon up.

When I arrived for my next appointment, she handed me a flyer for what I'll call the 'Gender Support Group' of Colorado. Glancing through the flyer it was apparently a support group for transsexuals and transvestites. By handing me the flyer, Stella had successfully kept me quiet enough that she could begin talking about her first husband. When I tried to ask her about the flyer and what it meant, she didn't want to lose track of the topic we were already discussing: Her husband.

By the eighth appointment, I arrived to find out it was check-point day and Stella quickly told me that I was to have an interview with her boss. I was ushered into a dark backroom office where a guy introduced himself, explained that his job was to get his own feeling about my case and then next week I'd be back seeing Stella again. He started off by noting how Stella had told him that I was so comfortable having her as my counselor as she reminded me of my mother. I burst out laughing and I said if she had reminded me of my mother I wouldn't have been caught dead seeing her. Her boss was taken aback, did I have issues with my mother? A bit, I returned. He was surprised Stella didn't know about that, but we have been talking about my gender issues, right? Not really, I answered, she's told me quite a bit about her own life. But that's just to get things going in the first week and you've been discussing your gender issues ever since...? No it's been nearly every week and I've found myself frustrated trying to get in a word about my issues during the appointments. Really? He commented as he made some notes. Yeah, I affirmed. So she told me that you wanted some medication. She did? I replied. You had talked with her about starting medication... he lead. No, I answered, what would it be for? You mean you haven't talked about it? The subject's never come up.

''Hum,'' he said as he made more notes and had a growing concern spreading across his face. That was the end of the appointment.

There were a few minutes left and Stella intercepted me in the waiting area as I was heading for the door, ''So that went well, then?''

I asked her what the whole medication thing was about and she looked nervous, ''You mean we hadn't talked about that?''

No, I answered and then I noted with a confused smile, ''And he said you thought you reminded me of my mother?''

''Don't I?'' she returned. Given that she physically bore no resemblance to my mother, nor in personality either, I said she didn't. ''You don't get along with your mother?'' she suddenly asked. I told her I didn't and she became wide-eyed as she thanked me and I was on my way.

When I arrived for the ninth appointment, I was first called into the financial aid office where they told me they had recently changed their standards, they would now need a full financial disclosure from my mother in order to figure what my adjusted co-payment would be since ''she was financially supporting me.'' I told them that, actually, I was more of a squatter in her home and she didn't give me a penny to help pay for anything, not even food. The financial aid people couldn't believe that and said the standard was now everyone living under 'one roof' must have their finances reviewed in order to determine what the appropriate co-payment would be.

When I affirmed that I wouldn't be able to get that sort of information from her, they just couldn't believe it. I then asked about the 'one roof' policy, did that mean that people living in an apartment building with one roof would have to provide all of their neighbors' financial statements in order to determine the co-payment of one tenant? ''Yes,'' was the answer I was given and I couldn't believe that.

Since I couldn't provide the level of financial paperwork they now required, my time with them had apparently come to an end. Just like that.

I was actually thankful for it.

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Holes

37

Why not, I thought in the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Seven. By the latter half of the eighties, more and more guys were getting their ears pierced, so why not me? Perhaps it was because Rochelle had given me a reputation for 'liking the girls', even though nothing of a sort had happened, that I felt I could get away with piercing my ears and not having people in my life 'suspect' me for it. Or perhaps it was my ever continuing weight loss and other physical issues that lead me to want to defiantly show that I controlled this body, not nature. Whatever had triggered the interest, I decided to pursue it and gave Ilda a call asking if she'd come along for moral support. She was surprised by the idea but was more than willing to echo my ''Why not?'' sentiment.

Off to the mall first thing in the day, it turned out the ear ring place didn't open up until an hour after the mall and Ilda and I shared a food court meal and mall walk as we waited and talked about what sort of ear rings I was thinking of. I debated about getting double piercings in each lobe and then I could have my two favorite colors as over lapping discs in each ear, orange and violet. I could have the orange one over the violet edge on one ear and dub it moon rising and have the violet disc over the edge of the orange disc for the second ear and dub it sun rising. While Ilda admired my enthusiasm, I believed, she may not have been in sync with the thought.

Once the ear ring place opened up, the clerk felt I was too enthusiastic and said we should start with a single piercing and let that heal before I decided on a double piercing for each lobe. Also their piercing technique required the initial set to be studs before looking into other choices. So Ilda and I looked the choice of studs over and settled on a basic gold set. As longer hair styles were still acceptable for guys in the eighties, my hair would cover the studs and thus it wouldn't be a problem at work, I believed, as management and customers wouldn't see them.

The following day the local science fiction club had its summer picnic and I got to show off my new studs to the other members there as a conversation piece. Sure enough work didn't notice, but I felt the need to show off my studs to a couple of my coworkers anyhow so the cat was quickly out of the bag. My mother didn't notice until a week and a half later and when she discovered them she said, ''Oh my God, you're going to get beaten up!'' She then questioned my mental health and so I then questioned hers back, giving examples from my years spent with her. She didn't like that at all, but as I was already on my way out the door to visit Jeff that evening, I didn't much care and didn't get back home until after she had already gone to bed. The subject wasn't brought up again.

I don't know if it was because of the piercings, my stuttering, my mixed race background, or a mixture of it all, but the grocery store decided not to promote me. I didn't even know I was going to have the chance. Once our group of four employees had been cut into the Dairy and the Frozen Food pairings, I got to see my frozen food coworkers much less, typically as we passed in the back room to get more stock for our various display cases. The least experienced of us became the head of the dairy section and, as I was committed to going to College at the time, I was his assistant at fifteen minutes less in weekly hours. When he had gone on vacation for a week I took over ordering for the area and many coworkers were surprised how well things had gone with me in charge, apparently thinking I wouldn't be able to 'stay on top of the ordering process' given my stuttering and thus presumed I.Q.. My department boss was happy too as, when he returned, everything was in shape and I'd even gone ahead and worked out the next order sheet as well for him. Then a few months later he was gone and the frozen food head was working the dairy case when I got into work one day.

I was surprised to see him there but, as we had been direct coworkers during our first two years at the store together, I was happy to have a chance to chat with him as we mutually filled the dairy case from the morning's truckload. But oddly enough, the one thing he didn't want to talk about was why he was there working the dairy cases rather than the frozen food cases he had been exclusively assigned to do when the new owner took over in the previous year. Eventually he explained to me that he had been explicitly told not to explain anything to me and finally said we could talk about it off the main floor when break time came. When it did, we went to the rarely used back office and made sure no one else was around. Our coworker, who had started the same day as us in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Four and eventually became my lead in the dairy section, had been found taking kickbacks from the suppliers in return for stocking various items over more popular items in our display cases. This had actually been a routine practice under the original owners who all shared in the gifts it got them. But in the case of the new owners, it was a fireable offense and the head of the dairy department was gone and they had called in the head of the frozen food department to take over, rather than promote me.

Was it the piercings, the stuttering, or the mixed race background? I suspect it was mainly the stuttering with the piercings being an added reason as to why I had been passed over despite my greater years of experience and recently proven ability to handle the department on my own.

So the frozen department head was now my boss, but he was to remain as the frozen department boss as well. I asked if this meant we were once again back to being a unified department but he told me No, he was the boss for both, but I was the dairy-only assistant and his original underling in frozen foods would remain as that department's only helper.

It was just a couple of months later that this coworker friend, and now new boss, was apologizing to me. While I had been away for two consecutive days off, the store management had decided I ''needed to be written up for something'' and they had lead my coworker/boss on a two day end to end check of the dairy department in search of something to be wrong in my work. By the end of the second day, they had found a cup of yogurt that was expiring that day and thus they had written up a report on me and I was to sign it my first day back. ''Really?'' I asked as the only way of avoiding this occurrence would have been for me to start pulling stock from the shelves two days before it went out of date. Was this a new standard? I asked. No, we were still to keep the stock on the shelf until the day it expired I was told. So then I was supposed to have come in after my first day off and checked the stock during my second day off for expiring items on my own time? Yes, was the answer and as I hadn't I was supposed to sign the report stating I had been negligent at my job. I declined.

When my coworker/new boss returned from letting management know I wouldn't sign it, he told me that they had been shocked and didn't know what to do about it, finally deciding to put the report in 'my file' anyhow even though it wasn't signed. He said he would have fought that too but, honestly as he had just been promoted to be the boss of the dairy department, he didn't feel he had the clout to argue. I didn't blame him and just made a mental note that my days at the grocery store were numbered.

In this case, I believe it was the pierced ears that prompted the store management to write me up. As it wasn't against store policy to have pierced ears, I had to 'officially' be written-up for something else. I was actually proud of the fact that they had spent two whole days trying to find something to write me up for and couldn't find anything legitimate...!

The silly thing is, we never checked the dates of the existing stock until the next day's truckload arrived when then we checked the dates before putting the new stock behind the old stock on the shelves. As we didn't have a truck on my first day back, they could have easily waited until the end of that day and 'found the cup of yogurt', then. It would have been outdated on a day I was actually working and I couldn't have denied it, but clearly they wanted to make the whole thing as transparent as possible so even I would understand why I was being written up.

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My New Owners

28

Once the bankruptcy court had sorted out the grocery store's finances and gotten it back into profitable working order, they were able to sell the store to pay-off the remaining debts. The new owner was an ''investor'' who lived up in Wyoming and wanted to get into the grocery store business. While he, himself, never came to the store, as far as we employees knew, he sent one of his trusted associates to come down to Colorado and handle the store on his behalf. I find his name wasn't memorable to me so I'll call him 'Bud'.

Bud's goal was to get the store into working order, which he was a bit late for as the interim court appointed management had done a good job at that already. But not so in the eyes of Bud and the first thing he did was make sure each person was assigned a specific set of shelves so he could hold them personally accountable for any issues he felt existed. He assigned these based on simplistic criteria. Whereas we would all chip in within our departments, and sometimes across our departments, to get our truckloads broken down and filled into the shelves, now a person was assigned to an aisle. You wanted to be the stocker assigned the paper aisle as your defined section given how large and light the stock was and fast to get on the shelves. You didn't want to be the stocker assigned the canned vegetable aisle given the small size of each item to be placed on the shelves and the need to rotate it. If you were, you were given the same time as the guy in the paper aisle to get your stock put up and if you didn't, you'd be written up. If the paper guy finished early and went to help you with the canned veggies, he'd be written up for working outside of his assigned area. On the other hand if the paper guy finished early and took an extended break until the end of his shift, well that was his reward for doing such a good job. Paying someone to sit around and kill time is a good thing, having the veggie aisle finished more quickly so the customers wouldn't trip over the remaining boxes when they came in during the morning, a bad thing. You do the math.

In the case of our frozen food & dairy department, the four of us were cut in half. The department head and I were assigned the diary stock and the other two the frozen food cases. Originally, two of us would come in for the truck load times to first put up the frozen food stock before it melted, then we'd get a start on the dairy stock. The department head would take the daytime hours and work on the remaining dairy stock until the fourth guy came in for the evening hours to finish off anything left. But now as we had to have one person cover the morning hours, we two truck load guys were assigned to come in hours after the truckload arrived, leaving the frozen stock to slowly melt on the floor until the frozen guy got in, the same was true for my dairy stock, but it wasn't as sensitive to warming up a bit before being placed in the chilled cases. As we started later, we'd leave at one in the afternoon when our section mate got in to cover the back half of the day. I have to admit I lucked-out and got the better part of the deal as I didn't have to keep my hands in the frozen cases one hundred percent of the time.

Gone too, was being a 'full-time' employee. Once working thirty hours or more was defined by employment laws to be 'full-time' and anything less as 'part-time'. The laws had changed leaving it up to each company to figure it out, with the proviso remaining that forty hours had to be called full-time and anything over was still legally deemed overtime for hourly workers. Full-time employees got profit sharing at the end of the year, part-time employees didn't, otherwise the benefits were the same and we retained our insurance coverages. Only our department head was chosen to be 'full-time' and the other three of us were deemed to be part-time. I don't know how the frozen food pair worked out their hours but for the first few months the dairy department head assigned both himself and me forty hours a week even though I was 'part-time'. After two months of this I jokingly asked the department head if this meant I was actually a 'full-time' employee. He decided to ask upper management about it, hoping to get me qualified for profit sharing. Instead, for all following weeks my schedule was changed to be thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes so there would no longer be any question about it.

Once Bud had 'straightened-out' the store into 'good working order' like this, he entered a normal routine of coming to the store at nine in the morning and roam the aisles to make sure all was to his liking, and finding people to write up for things he didn't like. Then he'd retire to the office where he would spend his time scrutinizing the time cards and crunching the numbers. Soon after he had come to run the store Bud had taken up to calling me ''Sport''. I hadn't had a nickname since my high school days so I didn't mind until I found out a few months later that Bud had named his dog at home ''Sport'' and deemed me to be his store's version. Why? Because of the stuttering or my mixed raced background? Or was I simply chosen at random to be dubbed that? Who knows, I didn't worry about it and just did my job.

Apparently I did my job well enough and I was never written up nor did Bud ever have any complaints he felt I needed to know about and by the end of this year he would be gone to whip a new business into shape for his ''investor'' boss.

Goodbye.

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The Three Best Things I Got From My Father

24

As I had started during the nights when I first went to bed at the age of thirteen, I would reflect on a part of my life as I waited to fall asleep. Often it would be about the events of the day and what meaning they might have on my unfolding life. In the case of my third full year in Colorado, I decided to consider what were the three best things I had gotten from my father. In the case of my mother, it seemed pretty clear: Honesty about my mixed race background, Gutsiness to go out and try something new, and Resolve to continue on a path even if the day-to-day isn't fun.

While my mother and her father had kept their Native American ancestry a secret and denied it whenever their background was questioned, mother raised me to be accepting of my mixed race background and open about it. I had. And on the whole it had been a good choice. While a very few had made fun of that heritage, being open about it only gave them a specific label to use when they would otherwise have made fun of me for something else. It's better to be made fun of for something that is true rather than for something that is false, isn't it? Also, not being in denial about it never lead me into the trap of trying to prove to others that I was less accepting of mixed race people than them thus assuaging any suspicion about my own ancestry.

While I had not always been thrilled with my mother's choice to move to Colorado, leaving my New England childhood environment behind, I had to admire her courage. Her first move out of the family home during my parents' separation had been to a nearby town that was closer to where she already worked, not a big change in the scheme of things. But to move to Colorado in her mid-fifties without any job lined-up, no friends to welcome her here and help her get settled, that was inarguably gutsy and I had to admire her for it.

So too, for the resolve to see it through. I could tell by August of her first few months in Colorado that she was having second thoughts, fantasizing that someone from New England would come out and carry her back to the only homeland she had ever known. But as she had made the choice to move to Colorado, she steeled herself to stay and make that new life work, even if it didn't seem like the best decision during the first couple of years. Sure enough, after years of perseverance, she had found herself a better job than she had ever had when it came to pay and benefits, she had made new friends to replace the ones she had left behind, and had even had a string of new lovers, though ultimately none ever panned-out to that second chance of a lifelong relationship she had hoped for.

And now for my father, what had he given me...?

As I lay in bed racking my brain, I realized just how much of a discounted role he played in my life, with the negatives easily overshadowing the positives I was looking for, but then came the most obvious: A love of Science Fiction. While never intentionally introducing me to it, I grew up in a home with plenty of exposure. From science fiction television shows which tickled the imagination, to the many books on shelves of possible future lives, some aspirational, some forewarning, some simply an escape from the daily grind of today. All called to me and my heart answered back.

And a second thing?

I had to acknowledge one day in my later elementary school years when my father had taught me a valuable lesson. My friend Pete and I were practicing shots at the basket ball hoop in my family home's driveway. As we did this, Pete was teaching me a new rhyme he had learned at camp the previous summer that we could say in rhythm to the bouncing basket ball as we got ready for our next shots. I don't remember it now, but it was something about the relationship of whites and blacks and used the N-word as part of the rhyme. My father was home that day and bustling about the yard and over-heard this and called me over. He quietly explained to me that the N-word was a racist putdown and I shouldn't use it, even casually as part of what seemed a playful rhyme. It was not simply because it was a put down, but by using it and other racist terms in my life, it would limit the people I would meet and come to know and I would be the poorer for it. When I returned to Pete he asked me what that was about and I simply told him that we shouldn't use the rhyme anymore. Yet, following my father's advice, I've kept use of racial terms to a minimum, only when discussing matters of those terms with friends, but never casually for fun and never as a put down to anybody.

But what was the third lesson I had gotten from my father which had the most impact on my life?

I could only think of the time when I was with him at the ski area during the off season and he was discussing some new ideas with his boss. While my father managed the day-to-day activities at the park, he actually did have a supervisor of his own, appointed by the owner, to keep an eye on things and consider ways of enhancing the property. As his job wasn't hands-on, this supervisor was rarely there on site, at least during my years passively observing the operations of the ski area. I would hear about him from time to time, right down to how my family's first home had been across the street from his own before I was born. But his office was almost always vacant and I saw him maybe a total of five times in ten years. This was one of those times as he was in and wanting to discuss an idea he had for expanding the use of the ski area.

My father would listen to his idea, the pros & cons he had thought of on his own, and then asked my father for his thoughts. My father just reflected back the pros & cons the supervisor had already stated and asked the supervisor what he thought. I was surprised as, when asked for his opinion, my father had ended up adding nothing and tossed the question right back like a hot potato. The supervisor juggled the returning balls of the idea and the pros & cons he had already thought of for a bit, but then really wanted to know what my father thought. This time my father talked at length about the pros & cons the supervisor had expressed, debating each one in the same way the supervisor had then, after a thorough recounting, asked the supervisor what he was thinking, again adding nothing at all to the debate. I was appalled as my father seemed to lack either any original thoughts of his own on the matter, or lacked the courage to express them. Either way, even if the supervisor was holding his cool, I was feeling the frustration for him. He again restated his idea and how it might help or hurt the park and again asked my father for his thoughts on the matter. My father simply again waffled, rephrased, and ultimately gave nothing back.

I concluded at that moment that I would never fear giving my opinion about something I was asked about and to always be decisive and not wishy-washy when I had enough facts in front of me and a decision needed to be made. And I have stuck to that tenet and never regretted it.

Though I have since learned discretion...

While the three best things I had gotten from my mother were positive if sometimes hard learned examples, I've always been haunted that to get three out of my experience with my father, I've have to include a lesson I learned despite his example, not from it.

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